Objects
0f choice - encaustic dipped VCR tapes, 1991
In
1991 I constructed a video booth not unlike a photo booth in the
UWS Nepean Studios. People who entered the booth were asked to
simply have a conversation with themselves or another real or
imagined person. they could choose to save the recording they
had made or delete it if they wished. A number of video hours
was recorded in this way. I had intended to use the recordings
in some way for an upcoming exhibition and end of year assessment
during my undergraduate studies. I sat for a number of hours looking
for elements of the dialogues I might connect together to produce
a coherent work.
What
happened is that most of the material was pretty ordinary, general
skylarking and bum pointing etc, but I was stunned to come across
six pieces that left me feeling at once excited and with a strange
feeling of being an accidental voyeur. There were elements of
the dialogues that demonstrated what can only described as 'beautiful
narcissism' others showing the power of destructive relationships.
I cannot say if the people who had recorded the pieces had left
them purposefully or just forgotten to delete the material, I
took a clue from the image of one of the subjects rushing from
the booth in tears, she had taken on the persona of her father,
even using her hair to imitate his beard.
I
did present the work but in an unreadable format, the six recordings
fitted onto two video cassettes, I heated up a large container
of encaustic medium with a red dye and dipped both cassettes into
the medium then air dried and presented them as objects.of
choice.
